I have an MS Word 2007 format file that is password protected on my own pc. We can't remember the password and of course now want to get into the document. I've tried using Alcomsoft Password Recovery but it was taking days and never got anywhere with it.
Basically, you change the extension of the document to .zip from .docx. You then open it up as a folder and delete "settings.xml" That has the password in it. You change the extension back to .docx and voila! (Hopefully.)
open a crack in word 2007
I'm not sure of the program but I presume it uses some sort of bruteforce attempt to crack the password, the only way to make this faster is to have more processing power, eg. A faster computer/more powerful graphics card.
We have a computer running as a dedicated password cracker since we're in the same position, it's been running the software for about 7 months now haha. It's definitely not a quick solution but it will get there in the end.
Microsoft Office files can be password-protected in order to prevent tampering and ensure data integrity. But password-protected documents from earlier versions of Office are susceptible to having their hashes extracted with a simple program called office2john. Those extracted hashes can then be cracked using John the Ripper and Hashcat.
This tool is written in Python and can be run right from the terminal. As for Office compatibility, it's known to work on any password-protected file from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Project, Access, and Outlook that was created using Office 97, Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003, Office 2007, Office 2010, and Office 2013, including the Office for Mac versions. It may not work on newer versions of Office, though, we saved a DOCX in Office 2016 that was labeled as Office 2013.
Next, we need an appropriate file to test this on. I am using a simple DOCX file named "dummy.docx" that I created and password-protected with Word 2007. Download it to follow along. The password is "password123" as you'll find out. You can also download documents made with Word 2010 and Word 2016 (that shows up as 2013) to use for more examples. Passwords for those are also "password123."
John will start cracking, and depending on the password complexity, will finish when a match is found. Press almost any key to view the current status. When the hash is cracked, a message will be displayed on-screen with the document's password: Since our password was pretty simple, it only took seconds to crack it.
When it comes to password cracking of any kind, the best defense technique is to use password best practices. This means using unique passwords that are long and not easily guessable. It helps to utilize a combination of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols, although recent research has shown that simply using long phrases with high entropy is superior. Even better are long, randomly generated passwords which makes cracking them nearly impossible.
Today, we learned that password-protected Microsoft Office files are not quite as secure as one would be led to believe. We used a tool called office2john to extract the hash of a DOCX file, and then cracked that hash using John the Ripper and Hashcat. These types of files are still commonly used today, so if you come across one that has a password on it, rest easy knowing that there is a way to crack it.
With Office 2007, Microsoft has, without a doubt, made a significant part of these problems "go away". Without anything more complicated than the native JDK itself-in other words, no third-party libraries are necessary-a Java application can now read and write any Office 2007 document, because Office 2007 documents are now nothing more than ZIP files of XML documents. Known as the "OpenXML" specification and submitted to the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA), the same home under which the C# language and CLI runtime specifications live, the OpenXML specs are available for any and all to download for free at ECMA . Armed with these, an installation of Office 2007 (for verification and some testing), and a standard Java6 JDK installation, Java can now crack open an Office 2007 document, scoop out the juicy middle, manipulate the contents, and re-save the data.
The basic structure of the Word 2007 document format is already fairly clear, just from looking at the resulting output. (And the fact that the "jar" utility understands this is, in of itself, exciting, as it means that the java.util.jar and/or java.util.zip packages will also be able to access the contents pretty easily.) Without even cracking any of the specification documents open, it's a fair guess that the core document content will be stored in "document.xml", and the remainder of the XML files will be various supplementary parts, such as the fonts used in the document (fontTable.xml) and the Office theme used (theme/theme1.xml), and so on.
Having read the file's contents, now it'd be nice to be able to modify those contents, write the file back, and open it in Word 2007. A quick glance at the ZipFile and ZipEntry API reveals a problem, however: while these classes can be used to read a zip file, they have no facility for writing one.
Yeah, nice but a little bit too late. Speaking of an 'OpenDocument'Format reminds me on UNO. UNO is an API for Java to be able to work with a documents. Instead of ziping/unzipping the document it gives the chance to work with OBJECTS. Objects are Tables, Paragraphs, Pictures, Lines, words or even letters. It is able to manipulate, save, delete or what ever somebody wants to do with the document and at the end you can convert it into a different format.It's not necassary to unzip the document to retrieve the xml file and then iterate through it. There is a much better way to do it. And you get a rid of reading XML tags by specific iteration or numeration.Check this out: api.openoffice.org/docs/DevelopersGuide/FirstSt...Cheers,Dariusz
Clearly Java's ability to parse valid XML documents is not in question!The issue with "cracking Office 2007" is not the fact that it doesn't have an XML format, it is the fact that it's format is a) a successor to an existing standard format, b) incomplete (missing required information), and c) not optimised for comprehension by third-party applications. The Wikipedia article includes a partial lists of criticisms. BTW, in that section it's hardly surprising that governments quoted from existing sources; why rewrite a criticism if it is valid? And on that basis, I do not rewrite them here but simply refer you to the link above, and to the Comparison of OpenDocument and Office Open XML formats.
Clearly Java's ability to parse valid XML documents is not in question!The issue with "cracking Office 2007" is not the fact that it doesn't have an XML format, it is the fact that it's format is a) a successor to an existing standard format, b) incomplete (missing required information), and c) not optimised for comprehension by third-party applications. The Wikipedia article includes a partial lists of criticisms. BTW, in that section it's hardly surprising that governments quoted from existing sources; why rewrite a criticism if it is valid? And on that basis, I do not rewrite them here but simply refer you to the link above, and to the Comparison of OpenDocument and Office Open XML formats.asdf asdfasdfadsfsadfasdfsdf
I have used java.util.zip to unzip a word 2007 document and added a new .xml file into the docprops folder and then zip it again to .docx document. now i could open the document using word no problem in it but when i retrieve it using .net it is the specified part is not there in the package.. what could be the problem ?..Thank you.
*NOTE: Be sure that you have changed the password to a new value, otherwise the next time you open the spreadsheet Excel will report errors (Unexpected Error), then when you access the list of VBA modules you will now see the names of the source modules but receive another error when trying to open forms/code/etc. To remedy this, go back to the VBA Project Properties and set the password to a new value. Save and re-open the Excel document and you should be good to go!
This is not valid for Excel 2007/2010 files. The standard .xlsx file format is actually a .zip file containing numerous sub-folders with the formatting, layout, content, etc, stored as xml data. For an unprotected Excel 2007 file, you can just change the .xlsx extension to .zip, then open the zip file and look through all the xml data. It's very straightforward.
However, when you password protect an Excel 2007 file, the entire .zip (.xlsx) file is actually encrypted using RSA encryption. It is no longer possible to change the extension to .zip and browse the file contents.
VBA Project Passwords on Access, Excel, Powerpoint, or Word documents (2007, 2010, 2013 or 2016 versions with extensions .ACCDB .XLSM .XLTM .DOCM .DOTM .POTM .PPSM) can be easily removed.
It's simply a matter of changing the filename extension to .ZIP, unzipping the file, and using any basic Hex Editor (like XVI32) to "break" the existing password, which "confuses" Office so it prompts for a new password next time the file is opened.
Colin Pickard is mostly correct, but don't confuse the "password to open" protection for the entire file with the VBA password protection, which is completely different from the former and is the same for Office 2003 and 2007 (for Office 2007, rename the file to .zip and look for the vbaProject.bin inside the zip). And that technically the correct way to edit the file is to use a OLE compound document viewer like CFX to open up the correct stream. Of course, if you are just replacing bytes, the plain old binary editor may work. 2ff7e9595c
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